Two separate news outlets have revealed the source of those shaped-penetrator super-IEDs that some anonymous official claimed could only come from Iran. Surprise, it wasn’t Iran. The work was done by Iraqis working with material supplied from places in the middle east that don’t lie directly to Iraq’s northeast.

Free advice to anybody who took these reports seriously – when administration officials insist on anonymity for no discernable reason, and when official spokesmen start passing the buck even before the full ridiculousness of the claims comes to light, it means that even they know they are full of shit. Count on it.

Wait for it…someone will be along soon to say that the reports out now prove nothing and that despite being a homegrown factory it was set up by Iranians with parts brought in by them from throughout the ME just to put up a smokescreen.

I honestly wonder how that type doesn’t get nauseous from all the spinning they have to do to continue to buy what this admin is selling.

Tim, you SERIOUSLY need some help with reading comprehension. “It wasn’t Iran”. Hhhmm… they might not ALL be from Iran, and “some of the components might not be from Iran.” Or so quotes your second hand (as usual) source. God forbid you actually do the research and attribute facts to the WSJ and NY Times yourself.

Wait for it…someone will be along soon to say that the reports out now prove nothing and that despite being a homegrown factory it was set up by Iranians with parts brought in by them from throughout the ME just to put up a smokescreen.

Hhhmm… they might not ALL be from Iran, and “some of the components might not be from Iran.” Or so quotes your second hand (as usual) source.

Sherard, exercise your comprehension here, and then shut up. The things are so simple to make, you can’t tell where they come from. Contra the “so sophisticated, has to be Iran” slop you’re swallowing.

Let’s try a fun exercise. Just because you like me so much, list every single datum of evidence that exists for the idea that Iran is aupplying super-IEDs to insurgents. Short list, isn’t it? It looks like the only thing on there is the unsupported inference from unnamed officials that these things are so sophisticated, they must come from Iran. That’s a logical inference that one can disprove by showing that Iraqis can make themselves. And lo, the Iraqis did make high-quality IEDs themselves. That makes the unnamed official’s logical inference, as he no doubt knew at the time, utterly full of shit.

But hey, thanks for playing. Your cheery goodwill always brightens up the place.

The grey PVC tubes are high pressure plumbing supplies. Not high pressure in a sophisticated explosives sense, but high pressure like for kitchen sinks or lawn sprinklers. The copper plates are all over ME bazaars and markets, only Persians have markets(?). Has anyone heard from McGyver, is he now part of the Jihad? First Cat Steven’s, then Casicus Clay and now McGyver, these Persian are truly evil.

What amazes me about all this “Iranian” influence is that the deaths of American soliders in Iraq attributable to possible Iran interference is around 10%. If that is true then why are they so upset about Iran?

While Saudi Arabia is funding the Sunnis who actually are killing our American troops but no one is threatening them.

Then there’s Syria…they have a weapons pipeline to Iraq and yet they are not singled out either.

It looks to me that Bush & Co is looking for any excuse to invade Iran. Again, evidence of incompetent and reckless policy coming from the White House. Oh, how I long for the days of “shuttle diplomacy” and heck, even Nixon is beginning to look like a good president now.

Do you have a link stating that rumor regarding the credit hold? That would be pretty serious rumor since the dollar value is going to plummet. My guess if OPEC moves to Euro we are going to see some hell here.

administration officials insist on anonymity for no discernable reason, and when official spokesmen start passing the buck even before the full ridiculousness of the claims comes to light, it means that even they know they are full of shit. Count on it.

Shortened for clarity. Simple facts do not need additional wordiness.

But sometimes really smart admin officials do put their name and face all over their lies claims. See Condi and the evil ALUMINUM TUBES! that she screeched about for months claiming they had only one purpose. To jumpstart a smoking gun mushroom cloud.

That our own nuclear experts, IAEA, and anyone else with a clue called bullshit, that those tubes couldn’t work even in the 50’s design centrifuge they claimed, that just meant more proof that Saddam was hiding their evil intent.

Clearly this is another hatchet job by the librul MSM. Any minute now we’ll hear that the bombs found in the bomb factory were just planted there by the diabolically clever Iranians in an attempt to throw us off the scent.
Any minute now…

re the 400 point faceplant, most of the causes were home grown, not Chinese. To put it simply, a whole bunch of bubbly in housing has recently popped, and it’s finally showing up in the stock market.

Not to say the fun and games in China didn’t help it along, but if it were China’s actions the drop would have happened a lot earlier than 2pm eastern.

Other candidates for trigger include Fannie Mae tightening subprime requirements today, or it might have been the release of way lower than expected Durable Goods. Or maybe the confirmation that the 4th quarter GDP of 3.5% is indeed going to be revised downward by a lot.

There are a lot of candidates for trigger. Frankly, what surprises me more is that it only dropped as little as it did.

Punchy’s right. 400 point reversals are not corrections, although they’re awfully alarming. What they are is a sign of toppiness — when the market starts spitting reversals out, prices have become unstable, and will soon fall.

China’s threat is sort of emtpy, folks. US debt is always issued in dollar denominations — if China tries to put the squeeaze on US, we inflate our currency. Hey presto, China holds less debt. (Yes, the PRC holds a lot of dollars. Yes, they can slow the debasing of the currency. If they do that, though, George Soros is going to make a lot of money really fast; the yuan is currently vastly undervalued against the dollar, and a sharp inflationary spike would only exacerbate that. Currency traders would have a field day arbitraging that.)

Speaking of the Dow sell-off, Jim Cramer of Mad Money just went insane, stating he thought it was a computer glitch and that a keypuncher recorded a sale that was misreported as much higher than it was supposed to be??? OMG!

Hey, Jenniebee, you are more right than you know. My son is currently deployed with the Army in Ramadi and part of his job is searching for IEDs. He says they find ones made in Iran but they find them from all over. Iran, Syria, Jordan, and of course Iraq itself, but the most common country of origin is Russia. He doesn’t know why, that’s not part of his job, but he thinks it might have something to do with the Russian ones being cheap.

…He says they find ones made in Iran but they find them from all over. Iran, Syria, Jordan, and of course Iraq itself, but the most common country of origin is Russia. He doesn’t know why, that’s not part of his job, but he thinks it might have something to do with the Russian ones being cheap.

If the neo-cons, enablers, and others who advocated the Iraq “liberation” really just made a mistake, the time has come for them to apologize and to make way for more competent people. If they will not, the world will know that they care more about their egos than about the twenty million Iraqis whose hopes for a better future they betrayed, the twenty million Afghanis whose hopes for a better future they betrayed, the three hundred million Americans whose credit they have mortgaged, the three thousand plus (and counting) Americans who have given their lives for no discernible gain, and the uncounted Iraqis and Afghans who have also paid the ultimate price.

As the war in Iraq, which your leaders entered against the advice of million of the world’s people, blunders on towards it fifth year and second country, I can see no equivocation, no excuse, no possible explanation left for the arrogance, incompetence, or the profligacy with blood and treasure. Two years ago, with this appalling bloodshed still in its infancy, I wrote that the grief for the young lives snuffed out transcends politics. Two years later, I still believe that, only now I find plenty of rage left over for politics.